Hackley's Traditional Education

Connections Winter 2002 -- Hackley’s mission statement commits our school to offering a “rigorous, traditional, and personalized college-preparatory education to able and motivated students whose parents value education.” The word “traditional” is important to Hackley’s identity, and yet it is often misunderstood in its application to Hackley. It may be most useful to start a Hackley definition of “traditional” by excluding common misunderstandings.

Connections Winter 2002 -- Hackley’s mission statement commits our school to offering a “rigorous, traditional, and personalized college-preparatory education to able and motivated students whose parents value education.” The word “traditional” is important to Hackley’s identity, and yet it is often misunderstood in its application to Hackley. It may be most useful to start a Hackley definition of “traditional” by excluding common misunderstandings.

First, Hackley’s “traditional” does not mean politically conservative. To champion a conservative political point of view would be indoctrination rather than education. An effective school should expose students to varying political opinions in order to stimulate their critical intelligence and provide a better foundation for shaping and understanding their own political point of view. Similarly, Hackley would be failing in its mission were it experienced as a politically liberal school. While a student body engaged in political discussion is a sign of intellectual vitality, I am disturbed when I visit a campus papered with notices expressive only of the liberal end of the political spectrum. Such an atmosphere discourages thought and debate. As an independent school and a school for children and adolescents, however, Hackley does not allow abusive or harassing language or behavior. We are governed by contractual relationship, and members of Hackley’s community have agreed that at Hackley, “free speech” is not an absolute right. One can critique “political correctness” as anathema to an educational institution, and yet proscribe, as our Handbooks state, discriminatory epithets or other “adverse statements, conduct, or treatment relating to a person’s race, color, religion, national or ethnic origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age or other personal characteristics.” One of our highest purposes, as stated in our “Philosophy,” is our attempt “to inculcate…the democratic ethic” by teaching our students how to be aggressive in arguing ideas without being abusive to individuals or groups with whom one may disagree. That is central to our ideal: “to strive to make Hackley a civilized community where courtesy, kindness, and forbearance reign, and incivility and intolerance are shunned.”

A second misunderstanding important to exclude is that “traditional” means opposition to change in pedagogy or curriculum. In recent years Hackley has made great strides in effective use of technology; we have also made significant modifications in curricula for English, Fine Arts, History, Math, Modern Languages, and Science. When describing Hackley’s pedagogical approach, I use the word “pragmatic.” Hackley’s teachers are skeptical of pedagogy advocated for ideological reasons, and are eager to embrace new approaches that demonstrably help students learn. For instance, advocates sometimes seemed to suggest that the “whole language” approach to teaching reading was essential to liberal democracy, while “phonics” promoted the opposite. Hackley’s teachers have found that a mixture of approaches is simply most practically effective in supporting the learning of students with varying learning styles. “Traditional” in matters of curriculum similarly does not mean uncritically teaching the same topics or texts year after year. One strength of independent schools is responsiveness to the intellectual curiosity of teachers and the expertise of departments. Because we do not have a bureaucracy that stifles curricular change, our students can experience teaching motivated by passionate inquiry. A teacher who is intellectually stimulated is most likely to be intellectually stimulating.

On the other hand, “traditional” does mean that we are committed to “expose…students to classic texts and traditional disciplines.” This aspect of “traditional” bears most on studies in the Departments of Classics, English, History, and Modern Languages. In the cultural wars, “traditional” is sometimes taken to mean the exclusion of texts by African American, Asian, or Latino authors, or the study of Western civilization to the exclusion of African, Asian, or Latin American cultures. At Hackley, the great texts of Western civilization will always be taught, if for no other reason than because they have shaped the Western imagination. Time has proven them to be worthy of our study, because generations of human beings have found them resonant with their experience of life. But a liberal arts education means understanding oneself in ever-broadening contexts and relationships – first in relation to one’s own family, community, religion, and ethnicity; then in relation to other peoples, other nations, and other times. One cannot understand oneself in those relationships without a study of the Bible, Vergil, and ancient history; Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and the Renaissance; Voltaire, Jefferson, and the Enlightenment. Similarly, the perspective of time has shown us the importance of studying Douglas, Dubois, Hurston, and King in American history. Just as Moby-Dick was not recognized as a “classic” for 70 years, so other texts can be judged as “classics” with the perspective of time. In October 1995, in my first speech at Hackley, I said: “Hackley is rooted in the defining elements of our traditions – the values that allow us to assess the new and the old with a common measure. Those values are, as they have always been, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty… We will not always agree on what is most beautiful, on how to act morally, or on what exactly the truth may be, but our civilization rests on spirited disagreements on those issues, and Hackley’s education could ask for no firmer tradition than a place in that unending dialectic.”

“Traditional” at Hackley is a matter of values. We believe in responsibility, accountability, service, respect, inclusiveness, discipline, hard work, kindness, civility, tolerance. Hackley was founded over a hundred years ago by Unitarians and Unitarian ministers who wanted a school which would embrace those of differing faiths and backgrounds. Today Hackley comes closer to embodying their inclusive ideal than ever before. Hackley’s families come from different countries, different faiths, different races, different economic backgrounds. Despite these manifest differences, Hackley’s families have chosen our school and our community because of our common commitment to these “traditional” values. That is what unites us, and together, because of our differences, we can better understand ourselves, our world, and each other.

— Walter Johnson
Back